The advent and progression of information technology has resulted in proliferation of data. Various data intensive sectors such as banking and financial services, insurance, telecommunication, automobile and health care have resulted in generation of enormous amount of data. Organizations working with such large volumes of data face several challenges while moving data from legacy systems to open platform or while consolidating data from various platforms due to different formats in which it is stored. In addition, various critical activities such as mergers and acquisitions, up-gradation to latest technologies, compliance to various law enforcement and government bodies require data to be uniform and readily accessible.
The need to transfer data quickly and efficiently across various mediums has resulted in the use of data migrations systems. Data migration is the process of transferring data between storage types, formats, or computer systems. Data migration is generally performed programmatically to achieve an automated migration, freeing up human resources from the tedious task. Data migration offers various advantages such as improved data quality, elimination of redundant or obsolete information, and synchronization of existing data for a new system.
Before performing any data migration activity, it would be preferable to be able to assess the data as well as infrastructural readiness for migration, so that the existing architecture and data of the source system may be evaluated and appropriate infrastructure such as servers, manpower etc. may be arranged in advance and the migration activity may be carried out smoothly. In addition, awareness of the amount of effort required in terms of cost, manpower, man hours, etc. is also required to perform a specific data migration. Further, a complete migration plan is required to be developed before carrying out any migration to prevent any unforeseen critical scenarios.
Even though there are several advantages associated with data migration, assessing the system for migration readiness and estimating the total effort required before migration remains a challenging task. One of the challenges faced while performing a migration activity is lack of knowledge which results in conflicting information and various lacunae in the migration plan.
In addition, designing a migration plan manually is a challenging and time consuming task requiring skills of a domain expert. Further, such manual design may not be time efficient and may also be prone to human errors. Furthermore, due to multiple environments from where the data is fetched, there is always a need of highly skilled resource to assess the readiness and effort required for migration. Also, the cost and efforts involved in procuring such resources for different environments makes the entire process arduous and infeasible.
Consequently, there is a need for an efficient system and method for assessing a user's data migration needs and readiness for data migration. Further, there is a need for a system and method to estimate the total effort required to migrate data from a source medium to a target medium. Furthermore, there is a need for a software tool that recommends a plan for migrating data, identifies migration issues and critical points and provides a subsequent plan for implementation.